Denver and the West

Education's digital divide more about bandwidth than computer hardware

TCS Communications workers prepare a conduit for connection on West 20th Avenue in Lakewood last week. In many far-flung and urban districts, the digital divide centers on sufficient data-streaming capacity to allow students to take the kinds of classes that many small schools can't offer in a bricks-and-mortar classroom. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

On Colorado's education landscape, the "digital divide" looks something like this: While one classroom streams online coursework to students, others log off the Internet so a school's meager bandwidth can handle the load.

The gap between the technological haves and have-nots, once defined by access to the computer hardware that drives high-tech learning, now centers on an information superhighway that too often recedes to the digital equivalent of rutted rural back roads.

As a result, classes ranging from Advanced Placement to world languages to credit-recovery courses may not be available in areas with lagging local Internet connections — denying many students the same instructional options as their better-connected counterparts.

"If a kid on the plains has good broadband access, he can mitigate those differences with online courses," said John Watson, founder of the Durango-based Evergreen Education Group and co-author of a study for the Colorado Department of Education. "When you don't, it's difficult — or impossible."

And as the state moves toward online assessment, such as some high-stakes testing slated for 2014, questions remain about whether the technological infrastructure will be able to handle it.

"Without an adequate pipeline, information may not reach teachers or students in a timely manner," said Dan Domagala, chief information officer for the Colorado Department of Education. "I think access is no longer the issue. It has shifted toward speed and bandwidth and usage — and cost."

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Those costs present a potentially daunting challenge.

A key 15-year-old federal program called E-Rate, which discounts Internet access for most Colorado school districts, finds itself fast approaching a financial crisis. That could cause more budget headaches for districts already scrambling to provide basic services.

Colorado has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to narrow the digital divide. But those efforts struggle to keep pace with classroom innovation.

At a time when "flipped" classrooms, online courses and blended learning — a combination of in-person and online instruction — present new educational opportunities for students, high-speed access to the Internet bedevils far-flung districts and the urban poor.

"I think the divide has been redefined," said Randy Boyer, executive director of the San Juan Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), which serves five counties in southwestern Colorado. "It's more about whether you have equal access to what's available through the technology — and no, we don't right now. It's a completely different divide than we used to have."

In the nine districts Boyer works with through the San Juan BOCES, the divide centers on sufficient data-streaming capacity to allow students to take the kinds of classes that many small schools can't offer in a bricks-and-mortar classroom.

But those options run into problems when Internet speeds lag from the faster fiber-optic delivery to satellite and dial-up modes that often are the only services available in remote areas.

"The speed is what melts down," Boyer said. "We've been able to manage in some schools. But it varies from district to district."

To help bridge the divide, an intergovernmental group called the EAGLE-Net Alliance has been using a $100.6 million federal grant — bolstered by another $30 million in matching funds from various public and private concerns — to build out broadband pipelines across Colorado.

The three-year project, which should be complete next August, is a so-called "middle mile" effort to take broadband to underserved areas, where local entities then compete to provide the "last mile" to end users.

EAGLE-Net already has helped ramp up the Internet speed in Weld County School District RE-1, a pocket of limited broadband access that serves the area around the towns of Gilcrest, LaSalle and Platteville just south of Greeley.

But while that opened the information floodgates to the high school, Weld County has the same problem many rural districts describe: Channeling the connection to more distant district schools slows things considerably.

"It's just not the same Internet access once it leaves the high school," said Jo Barbie, the district's superintendent who also serves on the EAGLE-Net board of directors. "Where we break down is to schools in other towns, 6 miles up and down the road. It's that 'last mile' that's the problem."

In another effort to close the gaps, the Governor's Office of Information Technology has used grant money to promote statewide resource sharing for education with a program that offers distance learning through 12 interactive sites all across Colorado — most in rural areas — that will begin operation in January.

In urban corridors, the problem isn't geography or even access but economics, particularly in low-income areas.

"There's plenty of bandwidth in this city," said Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg, "but for many of our families, it's a question of affordability."

That's what prompted Comcast, on a national level, to launch its "Internet Essentials" program last year. The cable provider offers new customers who qualify — families with at least one child on a free or reduced-price school lunch plan — $9.95 monthly Internet service plus a $150 voucher for a low-cost computer.

In the first year of the program, nearly 100,000 households signed up. More than 5,000 homes in Colorado have been connected so far, and DPS ranks among the top 10 enrollment districts in the country, said David Cohen, Comcast executive vice president and chief diversity officer.

Meanwhile, the E-Rate program that subsidizes Internet access for schools now faces annual requests of about $6 billion — more than twice its funding.

School applications for those discounts, which generally are fully funded, may get slashed in 2013 if the Federal Communications Commission doesn't raise the current cap of $2.33 billion — or find another remedy, said DeLilah Collins, who oversees the E-Rate program for Colorado.

That, in turn, could create even more budget woes as districts shift resources to cover costs previously picked up by E-Rate, which pays up to 90 percent of a school's or district's Internet bill depending on the local poverty rate.

Colorado schools and libraries last year were approved for more than $23 million in reimbursements.

"Something is going to get done — I believe something's going to happen," said Collins, remaining hopeful that the federal funding crunch can be resolved. "I don't think they want to realize this crisis."

Although access to hardware no longer defines the digital divide as it once did, now the device one chooses to connect online reflects socioeconomic factors that also may affect education.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that far more blacks and Latinos than whites use their mobile phones for most of their Internet access — a development that has "significant academic consequences," said Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, whose work often centers on education issues.

He noted that such users are less likely to access the Internet for educational purposes whose technological demands exceed a phone's capacity.

"When we work with education reformers and people concerned about outcomes," Garcia said, "one of the hottest issues is blended learning, how to combine what you do in class with what you're able to do at home through access to the Internet. We know blended learning is effective, but you can't do it if you don't have access."

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